Arthur Miller by John Lahr

Author:John Lahr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

After he testified, in left-wing circles Kazan went from cultural prince to pariah overnight. “I seemed to have crossed some fundamental and incontrovertible line of tolerance for human error and sin,” he wrote. He was threatened, abused, and shunned. He changed his telephone number and hired a bodyguard for his wife and family. (The ructions in Hollywood when he was chosen, four decades later, in 1999, to receive the Honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement, demonstrated that in some parts of the show-biz community Kazan had still not been forgiven.) Even though he could continue to work, the crisis had made him a contractual cripple; he was relegated to the bottom of the studio heap. As Kazan put it, he was “on a great social griddle and frying.”

Two days after Kazan’s testimony, Tennessee Williams sent him an expanded draft of Camino Real to direct. Although most of the theater community rushed to judgment, Williams did not. “I take no attitude about it, one way or another, as I am not a political person and human venality is something I always expect and forgive,” he wrote to a friend. Miller, however, could not forgive. Before the testimony, at the end of their walk in the woods, according to Kazan’s diary, Miller had put his arm around Kazan and said, “Don’t worry about what I’ll think. Whatever you do will be okay with me. Because your heart’s in the right place.” Kazan wrote, “It was like the truth of a pop song title. There was no doubt that Art meant it and that he was anxious to say this to me before we separated. We parted on affectionate terms.”

But after Kazan’s testimony, Miller cold-shouldered him. Over the next few years, various friends tried to engineer a reconciliation. “Gadg mourns your loss with unending sorrow,” John Steinbeck wrote to Miller in 1955, adding, “It’s wasteful that two such men should be apart. Please do something to mend this break. . . . I beg you to give it a chance. I beg you.” In 1956, at an Actors Studio benefit, Marilyn Monroe briefly reunited them. Taking Miller’s hand, she walked him across the room, took Kazan’s hand, and put their two hands together. Then, she cradled both their hands in hers. “There was silence in the room. The music stopped. Conversation stopped,” the actress Madeleine Sherwood recalled. “Marilyn said, ‘It was the most wonderful moment of my life when those two men accepted that I had put their hands together.’” But the gesture was cosmetic. Although they would collaborate one more time, on After the Fall (1964), for all intents and purposes, the pall over their friendship never lifted. “I would never really feel toward him quite what a friend should,” Kazan wrote of Miller. “Nor, I imagine, he toward me.” Kazan’s testimony and Miller’s subsequent silent treatment put paid to what Brooks Atkinson had once called “the Kazan-Miller era of American theatre.”

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